by Joe Garner
By then, however, Carol had seen enough. He’d only been racing for a few months, but there were too many broken arms and collarbones and concussions in the sport. “It made me very uneasy, and I personally was going to have a hard time watching that,” she says. “So John and I had a long talk about it.”
“If she says it’s too dangerous for him, all right, we won’t do it,” John recalls. “But we both agreed that Jeff was going to be a lot of trouble if we didn’t keep him busy. He just had tons of energy.”
Jeff at Capitol Quarter Midget Track, Rio Linda, California, April 1977.
Jeff in his white Simpson race uniform at Baylands Quarter Midget Track, Sunnyvale, California, July 1978.
Within days of that final BMX race, John made some phone calls and gathered up $450 and left the house. A few hours later, he returned towing a little flatbed trailer. When Jeff poked his head out the front door, his eyes lit up. On it were two quarter-midget race cars, one for him and one for his sister, Kimberly.
By the time Jeff won his first big race in July 1977, he’d logged thousands of practice laps, first on a small, weed-strewn patch of concrete his folks had cleared at the nearby Solano County Fairgrounds, and later at a proper quarter-midget track near Sacramento, in Rio Linda. Three days a week, John picked Jeff up from kindergarten, and the two of them would make the hour-and-a-half drive up north, where they’d run lap after lap, racing against the stopwatch, looking to take better lines, and figuring the best way to corner. “I’d get so mad at him, but I couldn’t be mad,” John says. “Really, you wanted it to be fun, but I wanted to win. But I couldn’t tell him that.”
John, who was then running a fledgling business with Carol manufacturing and selling custom vehicle parts for the disabled, logged extra hours in the shop to get every advantage he could out of Jeff’s car. “If I have any faults, Jeff would tell you, I’m not a regular dad,” he says. “I don’t know how to do anything in the middle. I’m way over here, or I’m way over there, but I’m never in the middle. And ‘over here’ is usually extreme.”
As a stepdad, he may not have been one for throwing a football or giving hugs or having a good-natured wrestle on the living room floor, but Carol was convinced he would always do what he thought best for the children, for her, and for the family. If John said quarter-midget racing was safer than BMX bikes, if he thought pushing Jeff was going to have a benefit, then so be it.
Jeff proudly standing next to his car on the front lawn of the Bickfords’ home with his first real trophy, a fourth-place finish, May 1977.
Jeff grabbing the checkered flag to win a race at Baylands Quarter Midget Track, Sunnyvale, California, April 1978; The cover and a page from Jeff’s Quarter Midgets of America Official Driver’s Log Book; Jeff racing at Capitol Quarter Midgets, Rio Linda, California, 1977; Jeff’s Quarter Midgets of America patch; Capitol Quarter & Half Midget second-place ribbon awarded to Jeff for a novice event in April 1977, before he became an official quarter-midget racer.
“The greatest genius of John is that he was not my real dad,” Jeff says. “I think he had just enough of a disconnect between being my real father and being an influence on me.” That slim line, he speculates, is what allowed John to lean on him a little harder and, perhaps, bypass a parent’s natural misgivings about strapping an undersized five-year-old into a car that could reach speeds of 50 mph.
Jeff in his car just before his race at Capitol Quarter Midgets, Rio Linda, California, 1978.
At one point, the family got John’s biological son, John Jr., a quarter midget, but his son’s mother “hated racing” and was unsupportive of the practice regimen. “We’d go to pick up John Jr. at the agreed-upon time and location and he wouldn’t be there,” John says. “She just wasn’t going to cooperate.” John Jr.’s visits were more about fun, like the time he and Jeff raced a neighbor’s go-kart down a hill, a thrill ride that took a painful turn. “I felt a tug at the right seat of my pants, then some serious pain,” John Jr. recalls. “My pants were shredded. Apparently, I had gotten too close to the sprocket on the axle and it cut into me. I remember a trip to the ER, and I have the scar to this day.” With all the stepbrotherly horsing around, there wasn’t much room for reflection in Jeff’s young mind, but he did sometimes wonder about the attention and instruction John lavished on him rather than his real son. “I remember feeling a bit of, ‘Does he feel left out?’ but that wasn’t really my place.” John Jr. enjoyed his visits, even wished sometimes he could’ve stayed, but he also admits he felt left out. “I had a lot of animosity internally. Didn’t show it to anybody. Didn’t ever say it. It was all just something inside that I dealt with because, as a kid, you don’t understand what’s going on. They didn’t mean to make me feel that way. But that’s how I felt as a kid.”
John shaking hands with Jeff after crossing the finish line. “It was sort of our standard procedure after every race,” John says.
Jeff, too, had to navigate a relationship with his own biological father. At first Billy had supervised visits at Carol and John’s, but eventually Kimberly and Jeff spent time with Billy at his house. It wasn’t always easy, Jeff remembers. Billy’s wife, Jeannie, had two daughters of her own, and when it came to their upbringing, Jeannie was strict as a whip. “There were times when I felt she was not kind to me,” says Jeff. “She wanted more discipline. John and my mom were definitely more open-minded, probably a little more spoiling to us as kids. Jeannie was more disciplined in general than, say, my mom was on certain manners, certain behavior.”
Things may have been a bit looser at John and Carol’s home, but it wasn’t all ice cream and merry-go-rounds. “I don’t believe in screaming and yelling,” John says. “That accomplishes nothing. And I never believed in spanking kids.” When Jeff crossed the line, John would send him to his room, telling him, “I feel bad for you because I had you at a higher bar. I thought you were a little smarter than that. Once again, I was wrong.” It drove Jeff batty. He’d feel so bad that he’d scream at John to just give him a whipping like other parents, and be done with it. “John was great at that,” Jeff says. “And it worked.”
Jeff himself was a bit more physically aggressive by nature than his stepdad, which often came out in schoolyard confrontations. “I wasn’t some big tough guy,” he says. “I was left alone for the most part, and I left others alone.” But there was no way he’d take a backward step if he was charged. Carol remembers having to retrieve him from school from time to time after a scrap. “It was his size,” she reflects. “He was small, and small boys get harassed.” His friend Rod Sherry remembers things a little differently. “He could talk smack with the best of them,” he says. Sometimes it was Jeff’s mouth that got him in trouble.
But as the racing heated up, Jeff spent less and less time in the neighborhood and more and more time at the track. “Once I got introduced to racing,” he says, “most of my thought process revolved around racing.” It was a steep learning curve, but he and John were ramping up fast. By the end of 1978, Jeff was like lightning on the track, smoking the competition and leaving the other fathers hollering about illegal parts and gathering up officials to take that engine apart piece by piece to find the infraction. John and Carol told Jeff it was just the way things were done—when you won, they tore your car apart. “I knew what was going on,” says Jeff. “It was a little frustrating to be accused of things we weren’t doing . . . but mostly for my parents because it caused friction with the other parents.”
Between 1977 and 1978, he won thirty-five main events and set five track records. While winning was great, it was more important to win right. “I had a rule,” John says. “Don’t be banging on the other cars. Set them up; pass them. You can’t just drive in there and ram into people.” At a race in the spring of 1979, Jeff had gotten a bit too aggressive in passing another driver and ran over his wheel—whether intentionally or unintentionally, he and John disagree to this day—on his way to the checkered flag. While Jeff was busy celebrating, J
ohn coolly walked up and told him to give his trophy to the other kid. Jeff pleaded his case, but John was adamant. Jeff broke down and cried, but he did what John asked. “He had to be professional in everything he did,” John says. “You don’t have Mommy and Daddy zip up your jacket and put your helmet on. You put it on and adjust it yourself. . . . You get in that car and strap your belts. You’re a professional. Act like one all the time.”
John helping out the other racers with their cars at the Baylands Quarter Midget Track, 1978.
At their peak, they would hit three tracks on a weekend, leaving home Friday for Rio Linda, practicing Friday night, running a race there Saturday night, then taking off for a Sunday morning contest in Hayward and an afternoon event in Sunnyvale. They’d run main events in two classes at each track to boot, before straggling home Sunday night dirty and tired. “I remember one time Jeff hadn’t done his homework,” Rod Sherry recalls, “and his excuse to the teacher was, ‘Well, I was at the racetrack all weekend and didn’t get a chance to do it.’ ” Jeff’s age and success were a novelty that began attracting national media attention. ABC’s television series, Kids Are People Too, and the nationally syndicated PM Magazine both featured segments on Jeff. Super Kids, another popular series at the time, focused an entire episode on Jeff’s young racing exploits. Suddenly Jeff’s celebrity was on the rise. John recognized the impact of television and the importance of developing a media-friendly image, which ultimately became a differentiator for Jeff as he progressed in his racing career.
Jeff racing at Capitol Quarter Midgets, Rio Linda, California, 1979.
John and Carol tried to stay on Jeff about his grades, but Carol never had an objection to the racing or the hectic schedule. “I loved it,” she says. “And you know why I loved it? Because we were doing it as a family.” At Rio Linda, Carol was the head scorekeeper and did some announcing, and boy-crazy Kimberly was the trophy girl, which meant she’d get a peck each time she handed brass to a winner. John was the regional director for the sport, and had his network of fathers and other enthusiasts with whom he exchanged information and sold tires and his custom-made parts.
Veteran sprint car driver Greg DeCaires, a childhood friend of Jeff’s, also competed at Rio Linda. Although the two aspiring racers didn’t compete against each other—Greg was a few years older than Jeff—the two would race during the day and pal around between races. DeCaires remembers Jeff as a smooth, smart driver. “He very rarely was involved in any kind of contact with any other car on the track. He knew how to keep a consistency out there. A lot of kids lose their focus or are just sporadic. Lap after lap, Jeff was always the one to watch on the track for sure.”
DeCaires remembers John and Carol’s motor home being a popular hangout for the parents. “They had a really cool margarita machine on their countertop. A couple of times a band showed up in the evening, set up and played music. . . . I remember once all the adults ended up dancing the conga around the track. Us kids would go find someone’s camper and just hang out.”
It became such a family project that at one point in 1978, they purchased a quarter midget for Carol so she could serve as a challenger for Jeff when he practiced passing and restarts. “He hated to practice,” Carol recalls.
“I did practice,” Jeff says, “because I was pushed to practice. But I definitely saw and understood the benefits. I didn’t see that—I didn’t have the self-discipline—with anything else.” Billy had gotten him a set of drums. It didn’t take. The saxophone? Lessons were too boring—he didn’t want to learn scales. “With racing, that’s just the influence of John, my mom, the competition—whatever it was, practicing racing was the one thing I was OK with.”
It paid off: 1979 was a huge year for him. They dominated the Northern California tracks and for the first time left to compete in other states. Jeff took the Grand Nationals in Colorado—the sport’s biggest prize—and ended up winning fifty-two races and setting eight track records. The following year, he won forty-six, posting the fast time in every one of the fifty races he entered. “I had a lot of confidence,” Jeff says about his growing feeling of invincibility. “When we went to the track, I felt like we were there to win.” In 1981, he took second place in the Grand National championship, this time in Oklahoma, in addition to dominating the go-kart races he competed in, which he and John had taken up as something of a sideline hobby.
“When you look at the statistical information, from April 1979 until 1981, we almost never lost a race,” John says with only the slightest exaggeration. With all that winning, Jeff’s first BMX trophy had some pretty prodigious company. “In my parent’s shop, there was a loft where we kept the trophies. And every once in a while, I’d get a ladder and I’d go up there. And I’d go through each one of them, and remember where I got them,” Jeff says. “I remember, I used to love to do that.” Not many ten-year-olds can take a trip down memory lane.
“By 1982, we accomplished all we set out to,” Jeff says, “and we weren’t as challenged as you need to be to stay motivated.” But they kept racing—and winning—anyway. “We did honestly think he was burned out,” Carol recalls. “He kind of got stale, or bored. We cut back to twenty-five or so weekends of quarter-midget racing,” says John. They bought a boat for Jeff to practice waterskiing. He went to windsurfing school. They moved to a new house. In junior high, he discovered break dancing and fell in love with it. There was still bike riding, skateboarding, and playing pickup basketball at the park. He kept busy, but the absence of racing left a time vacuum, especially during the period after school and before Carol and John returned from work. “When you kept Jeff occupied, you were good,” Kimberly says. “But when he had downtime, he didn’t always make the best choices. He’d tend to pick the mischievous kids and hang out with them.”
Jeff and Greg DeCaires hoisting Jeff’s car off the scales at Capitol Quarter Midgets, Rio Linda, California, 1981.
“My influences changed a lot when I went to junior high,” Jeff says. “I started break dancing and listening to different music and had other friends in my new neighborhood”—a number of whom were at least a couple years older and a bit more delinquently inclined.
Jeff relaxing after a race at Baylands Quarter Midget Track, San Jose, California, 1980.
“We started hanging out with different crowds,” Rod Sherry remembers. “He was with some guys who were getting in a lot of trouble—at that age I guess it was kind of the cool thing. I didn’t get along with them that well because I thought they were kind of punks.”
One of those new acquaintances was a fifteen-year-old named Chris, whose single mother worked nights and who had been cruising in his own car for several years. “There were a lot of very good reasons why we didn’t like him,” says Carol. Lack of parental supervision. Petty vandalism. Girls. Beer drinking. Pot smoking. And what she didn’t know, she suspected. “I’d probably be very naïve to think Jeff wasn’t doing that, too.” Jeff had his own assessment: “He was fun to hang out with. It was never boring.”
A Pennycook School sixth grade class photo of Jeff at eleven years old.
The two youngsters had a common ruse: Chris would knock on Jeff’s front door for Jeff to come outside and play. Carol would watch them set off on foot, but they’d quickly turn the corner and hop in Chris’s ride. Soon those daytime excursions turned into nighttime. “When my parents went to bed, I would sneak out of my bedroom window,” Jeff recalls. “I’d taken the screen off and had a ladder so I could climb down. One night we drove to San Francisco—it’s like an hour drive—because Chris said, ‘There’s this parking garage that’s awesome to ride skateboards in.’ That was pretty big for a fifteen-year-old kid who had other kids that were fourteen, thirteen, and twelve in the car with him at midnight.”
The adolescent crew arrived in the city pre-dawn and broke into the locked carport. “It was a spiral garage,” Jeff remembers, “and we went up to the top, and we would get on our stomachs on the skateboards and race all the way to the bo
ttom. It was one of the greatest nights of my life. Then we got in the car and drove back. I remember it being like three o’clock in the morning. I got back in the window and went to sleep and went to school the next day.” But the amateur sneak had forgotten to put back the screen, as his mother discovered the next day. “She knew something was up,” Jeff says. “I was a terrible liar.”
One night, at one o’clock, she went to check on her son. His bed was empty. “I don’t remember where we went that night,” Jeff says. “But I remember coming home and the lights were on and the front door was cracked open, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in big trouble.’ ”
“I was like, ‘Get your ass in here right now!’ ” Carol says. “Yeah, that was not a good night for Jeff in our house.” Jeff recalls that his parents told him to pack his bags, he was on his way to military school. Carol remembers him sitting on the front porch in the early morning with his belongings, crying his eyes out. “In total, I snuck out of the house maybe a handful of times. It wasn’t a regular occurrence,” Jeff recalls. “There’s obviously a theme. I’ve never been afraid of trying new things, even when risk was involved.”
While he never went off to become Sgt. Gordon, Carol and John knew they needed a new plan to harness their son’s energy.
Fourteen-year-old Jeff does a pre-race check of his sprint car at Freemont Speedway in Freemont, Ohio, 1985.
2
YOU LIED TO ME!